Emerging from the laundry swamps and Lego wastelands to keep track of our own insanity.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

And the rest of Sunday (which was not at all a day of rest)

Today was the Hillbender race, in which Rob was signed up for the 19 mile "lite" version of the ride and the kids had collected $135 worth of pledges for the bike-a-thon. Rob headed out by 7AM and the kids and I followed around 8. Turns out only 1 other kid had signed up for the bike-a-thon so they basically scrapped it and our kids rode away with some nice participation gifts and a free morning after we turned in the donations. We biked around the park a bit and played on the swings and then headed to the finish line to cheer Rob in.

Rob, meanwhile, finished his ride and was looking for us. Thirty minutes of misguided-looking-for-each-other later we met up and cheered in Rob's Aunt Judy before I packed 2/3 of the kids into the car and headed home. Rob and Jorge went for a short ride together and then joined us at the house that crazy built.

Flashback: Saturday we decided it was a good day to clean the house for the first time ever. The outside, that is. We've cleaned the inside at least once, I'm sure of it. But the outside had not been scrubbed since we bought it and it was due before that. We had looked into renting a pressure washer which then sort of fell through that morning but then ended up happening after-all around mid-morning. So by 4PM we'd scrubbed the entire porch (walls, soffits, facia, railings, flower boxes, columns...) with soapy water and rinsed it off and then pressure-washed it. And then Rob pressure-washed the foundation and garage and pretty much anything else within reach. And we scraped up the moss and I raked all the remaining downed-tree bits and general "tear it apart and we'll put it back together later" things happened. And since it was the 4 year anniversary of Jorge joining our family, we also went out to dinner where it was so so so cold in the restaurant that I ended up running across the parking lot and buying some clearance sweatshirts for the kids so they'd be able to eat. Good thing I still haven't officially done the back-to-school shopping because they really did need new fleeces anyhow. So we'll call it multi-tasking.

So that means today we got home from the bike event and considered our options on the porch project. Naturally we over-shot our goals and then August decided he was going to pick today to potty train--at least it was a gorgeous day! In the end we took both insanely heavy front doors off the hinges, scraped them for hours, scraped the threshold and trim, and then realized they needed at least one more day to dry out from yesterday's pressure washing before we attempted to paint them. So we hung everything back up. It looks just about as terrible as a heavily scraped oak-with-old-gray-primer-and-bits-of-purple-paint can look.

I did take the hardware off the doors and spray painted it so it looks like newer stuff, too, so we still have to put that all back on if we want to, y'know, latch the front door tonight.

And in all that, we had the fun of getting August to the potty every 15-20 minutes where he'd consistently have success. He did wet himself twice in the yard (too busy playing and we were too busy working; and once may have been just a sloshed water pail), but he came up and told me he needed to use it once and had a huge #2 success so....yay!!! Unfortunately all the 2T-3T underwear that Jorge had when he trained at 2.5 (and size 18 mos) continued to be worn by Jorge until about last week so it's all stretched out and falls off little August. New ones are on the list.

And so it was that we ordered pizza and wings at 5 PM and put all three kids through the bath by 6:15 and they are all now in bed at 6:45. Ahhhhhh.....

And the big kids have tomorrow off school (Rosh Hashanah). Volunteers for painting, cleaning, cooking or child care are welcome.